Engauge 2023 – What We Tended [In-Person Only]
INDIVIDUAL FILM PROGRAM TICKETS:
- $14 General Admission
- $10 Student/Child/Senior
- $7 NWFF/SIFF/GI/PCNW member
FULL-DAY PASSES:
(two film programs + one special event; for either Friday or Saturday)
- $40 General
- $30 Student/Child/Senior
- $20 NWFF/SIFF/GI/PCNW member
FULL FESTIVAL PASSES:
(includes Greta Snider and Harry Smith programs!)
- $60 General
- $50 Student/Child/Senior
- $40 NWFF/SIFF/GI/PCNW member
On Film
(76 min TRT)
Experimental filmmakers pay close attention to the world around them and find inspiration everywhere: in feats of nature, in built environments, in a fingerprint, in a garden or landscape. This program celebrates a range of themes or topics to which filmmakers attend. While every work originated on film, this is an all-digital program.
Header photo credit: Test Objects, dir. Sam Drake
Visiting Artist
** Filmmakers in attendance! **
Ticketing, concessions, cinemas, restrooms, and our public edit lab are located on Northwest Film Forum’s ground floor, which is wheelchair accessible. All doors in Northwest Film Forum are non-motorized, and may require staff assistance to open. Our upstairs workshop room is not wheelchair accessible.
We have a limited number of assistive listening devices available for programs hosted in our larger theater, Cinema 1. These devices are maintained by the Technical Director, and can be requested at the ticketing and concessions counter. Also available at the front desk is a Sensory Kit you can borrow, which includes a Communication Card, noise-reducing headphones, and fidget toys.
The Forum does NOT have assistive devices for the visually impaired, and is not (yet) a scent-free venue. Our commitment to increasing access for our audiences is ongoing, and we welcome all public input on the subject!
If you have additional specific questions about accessibility at our venue, please contact our Patron Services Manager at cris@nwfilmforum.org. Our phone number (206-329-2629) is voicemail-only, but we check it often.
Made possible due to a grant from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, in partnership with Sensory Access, our Sensory Access document presents a visual and descriptive walk-through of the NWFF space. View it in advance of attending an in-person event at bit.ly/nwffsocialnarrativepdf, in order to prepare yourself for the experience.
NWFF patrons will be required to wear masks that cover both nose and mouth while in the building. Disposable masks are available at the door for those who need them. We are not currently checking vaccination cards. Recent variants of COVID-19 readily infect and spread between individuals regardless of vaccination status.
Read more about NWFF’s policies regarding cleaning, masks, and capacity limitations here.
- Purchase your ticket through Brown Paper Tickets; come to the show!
- You can also purchase a ticket on the day of the screening at Northwest Film Forum’s box office (1515 12th Ave, Seattle).
- If you have purchased a Full Festival Pass or Full Day Pass, we’ll be able to look you up at Will Call by the name you purchased under.
- Film programs in the 2023 edition of Engauge will not be available for virtual viewing.
Films in this program:
Bridge
(Kevin T. Allen | color | surround sound | 10:00 | Super 8 to DCP | 2013/2023 | US)
A surround sound reworking of footage shot in 2013. This film is a study of three similar but distinct microcultures: the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge. Interrogated through the use of contact microphones, these physical infrastructures become audible to reveal their inherent macroacoustics. The film treats the bridge as an anthropological body for discourse, with organs, eyes and ears moving in time.
164 San Antonio Abad
(Yuula Benivolski | b + w | sound | 6:20 | 16mm to digital | 2023 | Canada)
In March the streets of Mexico City are covered in purple Jacaranda flowers. We live in Obrera—meaning “Worker” in Spanish. It is a working-class neighborhood. Walking home one night, I follow the trail of purple flowers on the ground until I come face to face with a large bronze seamstress, locked behind the fence of an apartment building courtyard. At home, I look up the address: Manuel José Othón, corner of San Antonio Abad. I find a photo of the monument and the following words: “Topeka, large garment factory, employed hundreds of women.” And then: “Bronze statue at site of collapsed factory.”
River Ghosts
(Jonathan Osuwan Johnson | color | sound | 4:42 | Super 8 to digital | 2018 | US)
In this experimental documentary, an unseen filmmaker uses unseen memories to follow traces of his deceased grandparents throughout urban and rural Thailand. Loosely following a travelogue-essay format, the search for identity is intertwined with the old and new history of rural and urban Thailand. Shot on Super 8mm reversal film.
Garden Variety
(Sally Lawton | color | silent with text | 5:16 | 16mm to digital | 2023 | US)
“What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers – a kind of sclerosis.” – Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary. Inspired by Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, the film attempts to measure grief and consciousness in the pandemic through images and monthly recorded notes. The images were recorded entirely in the summer of 2020, while the text stacks together several years. The simple naming and showing of events exposes the banality of grief, but hopefully also the significance.
Here Where Everything Ends / Aqui onde tudo acaba
(Cláudia Cárdenas | b + w | sound | 19:00 | 16mm to digital | 2023 | Brazil)
A poetic and experimental short film that travels in between documentary and fiction to approach a culture faced with extinction: the indigenous peoples of Brazil. It is particularly about the sharing of knowledge of the Bugio village, and made in a collective way in every stage of 16mm footage, botanical revelation and sound capture. It tries to reactivate the memories of the origins of the Laklãnõ/Xokleng people, while observing what is lost with the alienation of their knowledge and culture practiced by colonialism.
Remnants of My Identify
(Kevin Roy | color | silent | 4:16 | 16mm to digital | 2022 | US)
Hand-painted abstract film inspired by a fixation on the theft of intellectual property and the erasure of artist identity to train digital systems in the art of artifice.
Test Objects
(Sam Drake | color | sound | 9:07 | 16mm to digital | 2023 | US)
Inadequate attempts to describe a sensation; lingering seasickness, and other terrestrial disorientations.
tulips are my father’s favourite flower
(Nisha Platzer | color | sound | 3:03 | 16mm to digital | 2018 | Canada )
‘tulips are my father’s favourite flower’ was originally made as a 17-foot film loop installation, projected in a grassy field in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba. Contact printed, tinted and toned 16mm film uses the subject of the work, tulips, to guide reflection and interpretation of both artist and viewer. Notions of wandering, retreat, exploration, cycles of pain and hope are complimented by the haunting soundtrack made by sound artist, Apollo. While making this piece i was reflecting a lot on cycles of pain, but also noticing a constant, underlying beauty that exists parallel to the pain.
forms with space and distance and hills
(Jason Moyes | b + w & color | sound | 3:12 | 16mm to digital | 2022 | Scotland)
Exploring the relationship between electricity pylons and the landscape. Hand processed Super 8mm film with audio from the English sculptor and artist Barbara Hepworth.
Some Things We Tended
(Mars Saude | 10:00 | color & b + w | sound | 10:00 | 16mm to digital | 2023 | UK)
“Some Things We Tended” explores the future of food production in a changing climate through 16mm documentation of two sites in mid Wales: an automated research greenhouse and a small-scale organic market garden. These settings lead to a miniature excursion into a speculative future rooted in Welsh soil.
